Are the Olympics Fair?

Over the years the organizers of the Olympic Games have tried hard to make the games as fair as possible in terms of the rules, and procedures, and the measurement criteria used for the quadrennial competition. Yet, we all know that the system is not perfect. One obvious example is the subjectivity and the possible bias that affects such sports as figure skating and gymnastics. Sometimes, too, the playing field is not really level. For instance, when deep early morning shadows on the ski slopes obscure the terrain and provide a treacherous ice crust, the downhill racers who are the first out of the starting gate may be disadvantaged compared to later contestant who may have the dual advantage of better visibility and better snow conditions.

But there is also a much deeper sense in which the games are fundamentally unfair, in my view. The problem has to do with the fact that the games are totally oriented to a competitive, winner-take-all principle. To be sure, there is nothing unusual about this. Most competitive sports are organized this way. And the athletes who choose to compete accept this principle. But this also means that an athlete may devote many years to training and preparing for an event where the difference between "success" and "failure" can amount to a fraction of a second. Success in these terms is measured exclusively in terms of one's competitive performance relative to other contestants on a given day in a given venue, and not in terms of one's overall achievement.

What could be done to ensure a better job of acknowledging achievement and being fair to the many remarkably gifted and accomplished "losers" at the Olympic Games? I would propose that the performance standards in any event be divided into three categories, and that any athlete who finishes the event would be awarded either a gold, silver or bronze medal according to which category they fall into in their performance. So, in a hypothetical swimming event, gold medals might go to any contestants who finish within one second of each other, while silver medals would go to finishers between 1 and 3 seconds and bronze to finishers greater than 3 seconds. Thus, with 10 contestants, say, there might by two gold medals, three silver medals and five would be bronze. Individual performances would still be ranked, but the medals would not be based solely on one's competitive ranking. In other words, this change would not negate the principle of competitive success but would balance it with recognition for personal achievements.

Supreme Court (in)Justices

There is a scene in the recent movie about the life of the English novelist Jane Austen where a young lawyer(the protagonist)ruefully concludes that "justice plays no part on the law."

The term "justice" has an ancient pedigree, of course. To Plato, in the Republic, justice meant "giving every man his due" -- whatever he (or she) deserves, or merits. Plato's most famous student, Aristotle, spoke of "proportionate equality." Today we often use the term "equity", but in any case justice means being impartial and fair to all concerned and not having a bias in favor of the rich, or powerful, or corporate interests, or conservatives, or liberals.

Sometimes the law is simply "a ass -- a idiot" as a Charles Dickens' character put it. How else can one describe the so-called "three strikes" laws in some states where a three-time repeat offender may be incarcerated for life for a minor third offense. Then there are the cases of excessive "prosecutorial zeal"(shall we say), where DNA evidence after the fact proves the imprisoned person was in fact innocent. Some 250 wrongful convictions have been reversed to date.

However, the most important injustices in our system of justice have involved the U.S. Supreme Court, where more than once in our history the majority has been blatantly biased, and the Court's decisions have been manifestly "unfair". In our time, the Lilly Ledbetter pay discrimination case was a clear example. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it in her stinging dissent, the majority's "parsimonious" reading of the Civil Rights Act, which greatly constricted the applicability of the law in favor of corporate interests, served to undermine the very purpose of the law. The ACLU called the ruling a "get out of jail free card" for corporate America. (The Congress later acted to reverse the Court's ruling.)

The most recent, even outrageous example, involved the Court's reversal of decades of settled law and seven of its own previous precedents when it ruled that limits on election campaign contributions, mainly by corporations, violated the "free speech" protection under the Constitution. Corporations are not private individuals, of course, and they have plenty of free speech already. The fact is that money gives them a megaphone that can drown out the free speech of the rest of us. The Court's rationale was that the decision was dictated by a "strict constructionist" reading of the Constitution. Of course, the free speech clause said nothing about money, or about corporations. In fact, the Court's rationale violated both common sense and the common good.

So what's to be done? Well, in my dreams I imagine a (successful) re-play of the 1937 "court packing" proposal of President Roosevelt. After a similarly biased Court had struck down a number of New Deal measures, FDR proposed to add two more (liberal) Justices to the Court,as he and the Congress can do at any time. This is unlikely to happen, of course. Even the hugely popular FDR, after the greatest landslide re-election in history, up to that time, could not get Congress or the public to go along with it.

My other fantasy is even more unlikely, though it appeals to me as a form of poetic justice. The Supreme Court's power to strike down legislation is not actually authorized in the Constitution. It is in reality only a settled tradition that derives from the assertion of an "implied power" to do so by an early Supreme Court. So, under a strict construction interpretation, the Court's authority is a usurpation that the Congress and the President could at any time put to an end. Were that to happen, I'd bet the strict constructionists on the Court would find some rationale for loosening up.

Goldman Sucks

As John Stewart put it on The Daily Show, "the only people who have fully recovered from the financial meltdown are the ones who caused the financial meltdown." The reason for their recovery is not so miraculous, of course. We (the taxpayers) paid for it. And Goldman Sachs is the poster child for this remarkable example of rewarding criminals for their bad behavior.

Goldman is actually a financial gambling casino. Most of its transactions involve trades for its own investment portfolio and most of its profits go toward salaries and bonuses for the casino operators. At the height of the financial crisis, when Goldman was on the verge of collapse because of bad investments, it received $10 billion in TARP money from the government, along with another $12.2 billion from the government via the bailout of the insurance giant AIG, where Goldman had hedged its investments with insurance contracts that amounted to bets against itself. It was a no lose proposition so long as the government ultimately picked up the tab.

Now Goldman has an even better deal. By declaring itself a "bank holding company" at its moment of greatest peril, it is now entitled to borrow (nearly) free money from the Federal Reserve and get Federal (FDIC) insurance protection for its investors. The former (Republican) budget director David Stockman calls it a classic "easy money scam." I'd call it legalized looting, and we're the victims.

What's to be done? Tax them retroactively (it has been done before) to help pay for the damage they have done to our economy and our people, and take away their get out of jail free card. They're not really a bank and they're not too big or too important to fail. They may only be too powerful to fail, unless we collectively put a stop to it.